CompuServe Messages

(If anyone knows how to post a Reply to a thread and address it to ALL, please let me know. I know this is addressed to Aleksey, but it's intended for ALL, and I didn't want to start a whole new thread.) Good points on timesaving. That certainly applies to VARY.SXP and Pyros's Transitions, but not to Python. Python is a pain to work with, builds and pretty much requires you to set morph targets for Every Single Frame that the effect will go over (and that can cause memory requirements and .3DS/.PRJ file sizes to balloon like crazy!), etc. As for bugs in opacity mapping, they're not that hard to work around: just apply the same wipe you use for the Opacity Map to the Texture Mask (if the object uses a Texture Map — also set the Diffuse and Ambient colors to black if this is the case) and Shininess Map. With the (r3 and "4") Material Editor's wonderful (see, David? I CAN be positive!) Drag & Drop simplicity of copying existing maps to other mapping/masking slots, this is trivial. The point is that these are IPASes you don't NEED. You may still WANT them but my aim in all of this was to make those who have not purchased them and who were planning on doing so that there are ways to do the same thing without them. If they still want to purchase them, fine. But we operate on a tight budget here, and if we'd known that Python didn't do anything that we couldn't otherwise do, we wouldn't have bought it. That same money could have bought us, say, The Script Extensions, or Metareyes, or LenZfx, or something else that does things we can NOT currently do, quickly and easily or otherwise. If you don't want to mess with mapping rectangles and animating them but still want the limited transition effects that the Pyros Transitions IPAS package gives you, and you have the money to spend on that above and beyond all the other goodies you want that do things you can't otherwise do, by all means get it. Ditto for Python (though it's more of a truly useless IPAS since it adds so much memory and slowness of rendering because of All Those Vertices And Faces in all those Morph Targets for Every Frame, that it more than overcomes any advantages of not dealing with animated wipes — and such wipes can be made with ANY paint program that can paint rectangles, so you don't have to have Animator Pro!). As for why I don't use my name here, I probably will soon since it does seem to be a Forum Rule now. I've talked again to my boss and the owner of this account regarding this. I don't hide my identity by choice. This is imposed on me. I don't like it any more than any of you do. But it's not my decision to make.